If you like science, and you like spending a day along a coastline – and if you live in the Pacific Northwest or Alaska – this citizen science project might be for you. It’s called COASST, and it’s a group of scientists and volunteers who monitor beach-cast seabird carcasses to learn more about bird populations in their local ecosystems.

In June 2015, NASA’s Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project will fly its rocket-powered, saucer-shaped test vehicle into near-space from the Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai, Hawaii. The public is invited to tune in to an hour-long live, interactive video broadcast from the gallery above a clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where this near-space experimental test vehicle is being prepared for shipment to Hawaii. NOTE NEW TIME FOR BROADCAST: 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. PDT (13:30 CDT, 18:30 UTC) on March 31, 2015.

Peter Lowenstein of Mutare, Zimbabwe has submitted another set of unusual photos for us. One is above, and the other is inside this post. The photos were taken a year apart, but might have been taken on the same day if two photographers had been standing back to back, one shooting a cloud-striped sunrise and the other shooting the sun’s first light – showing banded cloud shadow – shining on a nearby mountain slope.

Can you find the star that’s shining close to the big and bright waxing gibbous moon on the night of March 31, 2015? That’s Regulus, the brightest star in the constellation Leo the Lion. In sky lore, Regulus is considered to be the Lion’s Heart. Regulus is also the only first-magnitude star to sit almost exactly on the ecliptic – the Earth’s orbital plane projected outward onto the sphere of stars.

Scientists announced this morning (March 30, 2015) that Mercury’s dark, barely reflective surface may be the result of a steady dusting of carbon from passing comets. In other words, over billions of years, comets have slowly painted Mecury’s surface black.